Grace

by Elizabeth Scott

  “Who does this belong to?” the soldier who moved me says, yelling so loudly that his voice echoes off the stripped metal of the train.

  Silence. Nothing but frozen, scared silence.

  And then Jerusha stands up.

  “I know who it belongs to,” he says, and his voice is clear. His face is calm. Cold.

  He can live through anything. He will survive.

  He, of all people, might be the one who can destroy Keran Berj.

  No wonder he was kept so close.

  “Who? ” the soldier says, scowling. “You?”

  Jerusha sighs, as if he is talking to someone very stupid.

  “If it was me, why would I say a word? ” he says. “I spoke to you after the last time the train stopped, remember? I asked if my sister could move.”

  “I remember,” the soldier says. “Go on.”

  “Well, you were by our seats. You saw there was nothing in my hands. Nothing in my seat.” He points to the woman sitting next to him. “She got on at the stop, though. She sat down here, and she had a bott—”

  He’s cut off as the woman starts screaming, shaking her head and saying, “No, no, it was there, it was on the train already, he pulled it out and said—”

  The soldier hits her. The woman howls and then falls silent, stunned.

  “She did board then, didn’t she? ” he says to himself, and then looks at the other soldiers, who nod. He turns back to Jerusha. “Did you see her talking to anyone before she boarded?”

  “Just a man, an earth-dark man who . . . ” Jerusha trails off, then says, “Wait. Is she—does she—is she one of them? Those—those People?” He spits the word as if it is too awful to fit in his mouth, too awful to be said, and stares at the woman in horror.

  The soldier pulls the woman up, stares into her crying face. “The Guards contacted us earlier. Told us to look for a woman traveling alone with short, dyed hair. Is that you, do you think? ” He yanks her head forward, pulling her hair, and she screams.

  He holds up a clump of it. It is white like the brightest sunlight on top and a darker, deeper yellow near the root. Not light brown-red, though.

  Not like mine.

  “Dyed hair,” the soldier says, and the woman cries, “For Keran Berj, for his glory, for how he says women should be,” but the soldier shakes her, hard, and says, “We know everything. You asked a soldier to throw the bottle away a little while ago. Off the train, you said, because the trash was full. You think we don’t know what you are? You think you didn’t give yourself away the moment you showed papers saying you’re checking on soil conditions between here and the border? You think that would fool anyone other than some desert rejects?”

  “But I am checking on soil conditions and the tea—he gave it to me!” the woman says, pointing at Jerusha.

  “Except he didn’t have it because I saw him. You were the one who tried to get rid of it.”

  “No, I just asked a soldier to throw it away because the trash is full, and he said he’d throw it off the train. I didn’t ask that. I’m not—my papers are real! I believe in Keran Berj! ”

  “Of course you do,” the soldier says, and then starts to drag her off the train.

  She screams, pleading for someone to look at her papers, to call her office.

  She is still screaming when the Guards appear again, lit by the soldiers’ lamps.

  The lamps are switched off and as darkness falls again there’s the sound of low voices and her sobbing. It goes on for a moment and then there is silence.

  It is so quiet I think the stars will fall from the sky.

  But they don’t. They stay, shining brightly far away, and the silence on the train is complete, endless.

  Eventually, the train begins to move again.

  The woman is not on it.

  CHAPTER 32

  I press my face against the window, feel the bitter cold bite into my skin. I should not be glad I am alive—I know what that woman’s fate was—but I am.

  I do not move when someone sits next to me. I know who it is.

  “You knew this would happen,” I say, looking away from the window, looking at him, and Jerusha says, “Yes.”

  “The man who sold me the water—”

  “His hands,” Jerusha says. “They were like mine. No marks from labor, no dirt under his nails. He’s never touched the ground in his life except to kick people into it.”

  “But why did you ...?” I say, and trail off as I see something in the darkness of the train car, something I couldn’t see when I looked at him before because the light only showed me what I knew. It showed me Jerusha, the monster.

  I never thought to look past it.

  “Mary,” I say, surprised, and Jerusha echoes it back, his voice shaking.

  In my mind’s eye, I see the last picture I saw of him again now. How he was turned so the camera didn’t catch him. Turned so he didn’t have to see the body swinging from Keran Berj’s monument to himself. Turned so he didn’t have to see Mary die.

  “She should be here,” he says.

  I don’t know what to say. I’ve seen the mark around his neck. I’ve seen what she tried to do.

  I know she wouldn’t want to be here.

  “I found out who she was. What she was,” he says, and his voice is so thick with something I cannot name that my skin prickles. “And if I knew, Keran would find out. There’s no way to keep a secret from him, not ever.” He shakes his head. “But I thought I could—I thought maybe I could save her. I thought . . . I thought she’d want to get away. Be . . . be free.”

  I think of everything I was taught, and I know exactly what she would have said to him when he spoke of being free.

  “We—the People—fight for freedom, to live as we will. All else must be set aside for that.”

  “That’s exactly what she said,” he says, and I recognize what’s in his voice now. Bitterness. “And when I said, ‘Freedom depends on setting aside everything in its name,’ she smiled at me for real for the first time—the only time—and said, ‘Yes, now you see.’”

  I stare at him, a chill creeping up my spine. Those words are so similar. The People and Keran Berj and . . . no. I push the thought away. It’s not how it sounds.

  It can’t be.

  I can’t have been taught what Jerusha was.

  I can’t.

  I swallow. “It’s different for us. We mean it.”

  He looks at me. “And so does Keran Berj every time he says it, which is at the end of almost every speech. So how is it different? ”

  I look at my hands. I am tired of thinking. Of trying to find the right thing to say when everything I know has a mirror image that I am terrified to see, but do.

  “I don’t know,” I finally say. “I just . . . All I know is that I don’t want death anymore.”

  And there it is. I don’t want death. I want life. The opposite of everything I know. That I was taught to believe. To do.

  “Mary did,” he says, and I look at him.

  “She asked you to—?”

  “No,” he says. “After I found out who she was, I told her she had to go, that she wasn’t safe, but she wouldn’t . . .” He stops speaking, and I know he is touching the closed collar of his shirt. Thinking about what lies underneath.

  “She cut me along my scar,” he says after a moment. “I stood there, blood everywhere, my blood in her hair, on her face, and thought ‘If this is what she wants,’ but then—” He sighs. “I didn’t want to die. I called for help. I told her I lov—I said things to her. And she laughed at me. Said I was nothing. Said that when I died she was going after Keran Berj.”

  “So you handed her over to him.”

  “No,” he says. “I still wanted to save her. I still thought I could. So I hit her with a sculpture of Keran Berj, put my Guard sash in her mouth to keep her quiet—I was in training for them, was going to be the Chief Guard one day—and shoved her into my wardrobe. I was going to let her out. I was going to make her
leave the City. I didn’t think—” I hear him swallow.

  “She was found,” I say. “And Keran Berj killed her.”

  “Not him,” he says, voice cracking. “I was in the hospital for a week because of the cut. Not that long, but I hadn’t told anyone about her being in the house, said I didn’t know who’d tried to kill me, that they’d gotten away, and she—she was there in the wardrobe without water. A person can’t live—”

  “I know,” I say, because I do. The Rorys sometimes leave soldiers tied to the ground with their water bottles just out of reach, a message to those that find them.

  “Not everyone knows that,” he says. “I asked a girl at a dinner party about it right before . . . right before I left. I said, ‘Do you know how long a person can live without water?’ and she smiled and shook her head and pressed up against me even though she was shaking with fear. Even though we both knew she didn’t want to be near me.”

  “Because of who you are.”

  He smiles at me, starlight showing a quick glimpse of teeth, of his mouth curled feral. “Yes,” he says. “Because of who I am. What I did. The Minister of Defense wrote a poem celebrating my accomplishments after I got out of the hospital. He read it to me while he had people pull Mary out of the wardrobe. He’d found her there two days before I came home—he didn’t believe that I didn’t know who’d tried to kill me, and he knew where to look—but he waited until I was there to take her out. The Minister said he knew I’d want to see how I’d managed to kill her.”

  “And you watched him pull her body out?”

  And after that, he’d watched Keran Berj hang her corpse.

  “Of course,” he says. “I know what happens when you don’t obey. You die. I know that better than anyone, don’t I?”

  CHAPTER 33

  I look at him. “Don’t you see that’s why there has to be change? All Keran Berj brings is death. You know that. You just said so.”

  “And what will your People do?” he says, staring at me. “What changes will they bring? What did they do to you when you didn’t obey? When you didn’t die like they wanted? ”

  “They didn’t kill me. And they don’t teach children to kill their parents.”

  “You’re right,” he says. “They just left you behind instead, made it so your only choice was Christaphor and then me. And of course they teach children to kill others, or kill themselves and others. Isn’t that what you learned? What you were?”

  Yes.

  I sit silently for a moment and then spit out, “Why didn’t you do what Mary would have wanted you to?”

  He looks away then. “You already know I don’t want to die. Isn’t that why we’re both here? ”

  “No, not that and you—you know what I mean. Why didn’t you kill Keran Berj? ”

  “I . . . what change would that bring? You think his death would truly make this world different?” He blows out a breath, closing his eyes briefly.

  “You tried to do it,” I say, shocked. “You did try to do it and you failed, didn’t you? That’s why you’re really here.”

  “I didn’t try to kill Keran Berj,” he says, his voice brittle. “I wanted the Minister of Defense to die because he—I wanted him to die, and he did. I got up one night, got out the pistol Keran Berj gave him for his birthday, woke him up, and shot him.”

  “You . . . you lived with him?”

  “He was my guardian.” Jerusha says. “He was the one who helped me write what I’d heard my parents say for Keran Berj. He came to their house, ate dinner with them, and then asked if he could take me for a walk. He sat me down on the bench by Keran Berj’s statue in Berj Park and said he’d been given my letter. He said he was proud of me, that he could tell I was special, and that he’d help me with my letter, make it better.”

  “So he—”

  “No,” Jerusha says. “I wanted to do it. I didn’t want to leave home and go somewhere far away. I wanted to stay in school with my friends. I wanted to be like Keran Berj said he was. So I wrote down everything the Minister told me to and when my parents were arrested I stood next to Keran Berj and told them they were bad for wanting to leave.”

  He touches my arm and when I flinch, he lets out a little sigh. “That’s exactly what Mary did when I told her the story. That’s how I knew she came from the People. Every girl Keran sent me had that response trained out of her. He’s good at it, wants to keep all their fear for himself. But Mary was—there was still something real about her. Inside her. She believed in things and I . . . I wanted that for myself. Just for a little while.”

  Like she was a thing. Like she wasn’t a person. I wonder if anyone has ever been real to him and a shudder travels across my skin. I don’t pull away, though. I just press my feet into the hot floor instead. The pain is familiar now.

  “That’s how I know you want to live,” he says. “She pulled away from me. You don’t.”

  “You want to live too. You didn’t die for her, you didn’t even do what she would have wanted,” I say, hating him for making me sound as weak as I am. Hearing him say what I want sounds so simple, but so selfish. I have turned my back on a lifetime of training, of beliefs everyone around me found easy to carry. I turned to myself and I . . .

  I am not sorry for it. Not like I should be.

  “Yes, I want to live too,” he says, and I hear something strange in his voice, look over and see that the night sky has lightened enough to show his face is tense and sad. “I wrote down what the Minister said I needed to. I didn’t cry when Keran Berj told me my parents could never come home because the Minister said not to, and moved into his house after I watched them die because he said he would make sure I never had to leave. He said he would always watch over me because I was so special to him.”

  He looks at me. “I learned what special meant to him then. Years of it, of being special, and then I watched him grin at Mary’s body. I told him I was glad he was there when he looked at me. I memorized his poem and recited it to Keran Berj before they hanged her corpse as a warning to the People. I told him I was grateful for everything he’d done to protect me before he fell asleep the night I shot him.”

  “He—the Minister—?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you are so important to Keran Berj. He wouldn’t—”

  “You’re really surprised, aren’t you? ” he says, and there is astonishment in his own voice. “You, who claim to know exactly what he is capable of ? ”

  “But you were a child.”

  “Once,” he says, and his voice is thick with a feeling I know, that I’ve lived with forever. Shame. Shame for having blood in me that made it so I could never truly be one of the People. Shame for being sent to Angel House so Da could prove his worth and be rid of the memory of my mother. Shame that I never believed in what I was taught like I should have. Shame that in spite of all the lessons and prayers that when I thought about forever—about living beyond this world—I didn’t want to die.

  CHAPTER 34

  You didn’t kill the Minister for Mary,” I say, thinking of how I took the belt from Liam’s hips. How I didn’t look for Da. How I pushed the bomb down and walked away from it, far away enough to be safe.

  To live.

  “No,” he says. “It was for me. I did it because I stayed with him for years and never . . . I stayed. I did it because I could have turned away when they arrested my parents, when I realized they were truly going to die, and I didn’t. I did it because I watched them hang. Keran Berj would have killed me before their necks even had a chance to snap if I’d only looked away. So I didn’t. I wanted to live. I just—no matter what happens, I keep wanting to live. Just like you killed thirty-four people but not who you were supposed to, and not yourself. You weren’t thinking about them. You think about you. About surviving. I understand that. I understand you.”

  Thirty-four people? I killed thirty-four people? “I didn’t know—I never thought—”

  “About them?” he says, and there is nothing
I can say in reply.

  Because I didn’t think about that. In all the thinking I’ve done about that day, about the bomb, I never thought about them. About the people who were there.

  People who died the day I decided I wanted to live.

  Why have I never wondered about them? I’ve thought about how I could have died, should have died, but I never thought about what happened to the crowd when the bomb went off, never thought about the people around me, in front of me. I never—

  I never even looked at them.

  I looked at the fire. I’ve dreamed of the flowers, of blood. Of it all over me, in me until it is all I am.

  But it already is.

  I am as bad as Jerusha. I am a killer.

  And yet he has thought about what he’s done while I—

  I haven’t.

  “I didn’t think about it at first either,” he says, as if he knows my thoughts and he does. He does. “I was six years old, and I just wanted my parents to stop talking about leaving. But once it started, I couldn’t stop it, and afterward I just—I had to put it away for a long time. The thing is, the scar—it wasn’t from them. They never tried to hurt me. Keran Berj strung me up on a rope in front of them until they confessed.”

  He rubs his shirt collar, touching that top button once again. “They did it right away, but he left me there, made them watch me struggle. He asked me if I understood why he was doing it and I said I did. I just wanted the pain to stop and when it did I didn’t . . . I didn’t even look at my parents when he cut me down and told me to go. I just left. I never even told them goodbye.”

  “Do you . . . do you think about them now?”

  “Yes,” he says, a simple, broken word.

  I look out the window. The stars are fading, drifting away as the dark sky slowly fills with morning light.

  I take a deep breath.

  CHAPTER 35

  They’ll forgive you,” I say slowly, hating the words as I say them but knowing they’re true. “Over the border, I mean. Everyone will forgive you for what happened. You were young. You—you got broken by terrible things. And now you have a way to stop Keran Berj. You have those codes you took. You’ll be a hero. The past will . . . it will be understood. Forgotten.”